It is several months after the cliff hanger ending of From Russia with Love. On the last page of that novel Bond was kicked in the calf by the head of SMERSH’s Execution Division, Rosa Klebb, with a pointed shoe tipped with poison. Now we learn that it was fugu poison from the Japanese globe-fish, and that Bond would have died but for the prompt action of his friend Mathis, from the French Deuxième Bureau, who gave him the kiss of life until a doctor arrived with an antidote.

After some months resting and recuperating, Bond is given a ‘simple’ mission in Jamaica. The Head of station, Strangways (handsome man with an eye patch) and his female number two, Truelove, have disappeared, presumed absconded as lovers. We, the readers, know they were in fact assassinated by three black men (in a typical macabre Fleming touch, pretending to be blind), who removed their corpses in a hearse (!) and burned the station building to the ground.

In the Regents Park HQ of the Secret Service, M and the Chief of Staff (Bill) fill Bond in on Strangways’ last piece of work. Some rare ‘roseate spoonbills’ inhabit an island off Jamaica, Crab Key. The island was bought before the war by a Chinese-German businessman named Dr Julius No, who invested in a business reclaiming and selling guano. The war caused a boom in prices. But since the war ended the island has become off limits to locals and fishermen. In fact two long-term bird watchers from the American Audubon Society recently had some kind of accident: one of them died, the other washed up on the mainland with some crazy story about a fire-breathing dragon. When the Society sent a plane to the island’s small airport to investigate, it crashed, killing the Society’s members. Strangways was trying to get to the bottom of this nonsense, says M dismissively, when he ran off with Truelove. ‘Go and sort it out, Bond.’

Jamaica

So Bond flies to Jamaica (involving another typically detailed description of a jet airliner journey and of the view from the plane descending into the tropical island). He is delighted to be met by the Cayman Islander, Quarrel, who he worked with on the Live and Let Die adventure. Not so happy, however, to be photographed at the airport and then tailed into Kingston: someone knows he’s here.

In fact, in several ways he realises that he’s being followed and threatened. When he visits the Colonial Secretary, Pleydell-Smith, the latter is already aware of Bond’s existence, because he found Bond’s file lying around on his desk. Hmm. Who had got it out? When Pleydell-Smith asks his secretary to find the Crab Key file, Bond isn’t surprised when the secretary, Miss Taro, politely says it is empty. Her excuse is that Commander Strangways must have taken it. But she is a Chinese and, Bond strongly suspects, working for Dr No. Now he realises that the woman photographer who snapped him at the airport then turned up again at the beachfront bar where Quarrel and Bond eat dinner, was called Annabel Chung, and was also Chinese. Like Dr No.

Bond gets Quarrel to carry out a complicated subterfuge: finding and paying two men who look like them, to dress like them and drive Strangways’ old sports car (a Sunbeam Talbot) over the hills to a distant port. A day later he reads in the newspaper (the Daily Gleaner) that the car had a mysterious crash, killing both its occupants.

Someone is not only tailing him, but trying to kill him. The game is on!

Pleydell-Smith gives him a briefing about Crab Key which more or less repeats the one he had in London. The price of guano shot up during the war. Dr Julius No had bought the island and begun harvesting it before then, so must have made a fortune. Employs coolie labour which he probably works to death. But stays on the island, no-one sees him, doesn’t encourage visitors.

That night, retiring to his smart hotel bedroom, Bond is told a basket of fresh fruit was delivered courtesy of the High Commission. He’s suspicious. When he examines the fruit he finds a tiny discoloured pinprick in each item. He packs the box in a crate and sends it to Pleydell-Smith, a few days later getting a reply that each fruit was injected with enough cyanide to kill a horse. So…

In the middle of the night he wakes and lies stock still in terror, realising some kind of enormous insect is slowly climbing up his leg. In a gruesome piece of macabre horror, Bond realises it is a giant poisonous centipede and we are given a typically vivid Flemingesque description of precisely how it feels to have lots of little insect legs rippling up your leg, then stomach, then pausing at the heart (‘don’t bite, don’t bite’ Bond thinks) then, even worse, up to the beating pulse of the carotid artery in his neck, before finally climbing over his face, along his nose and through his hair, and finally, thankfully, off his body and onto the pillow. There is no explanation of how it got there, but Bond – having shaken it out of the bed and stamped it to death – realises he can’t leave town soon enough.

Repetition

Quarrel is worried at the prospect of this mission and asks Bond to insure his life, which Bond agrees to do for $5,000, with Quarrel’s family as beneficiaries. He and Quarrel drive over to the northern coast of Jamaica, to the very same bay – Morgan’s Bay – in which sits Surprise Isle, the base of Mr Big in Live and Let Die. Bond remembers the gruelling undersea trek out to the island in that book, and then the wildly improbable way he saved himself and Solitaire from being torn to shreds on the coral reef. He wonders where Solitaire is today, he has no idea… (p.60)

He and Quarrel have come to the north coast to set up base once again in the abandoned Beau Desert Plantation Mansion in order a) for Bond to train under Quarrel’s guidance, then b) to sail in a fishing boat to Crab Key and go poke around.

What is astonishing about Dr No is the prominence of this repetition: not just Jamaica, but the same abandoned plantation, Beau Desert, with the same view over the self-same Morgan Bay as in Live and Let Die, and then the same training regime (swim down the coast, run back along the beach) with the same aim – to go by sea into the Enemy Island (Surprise Isle or Crab Key).

Crab Key

After a week’s training, Bond and Quarrel set sail in Quarrel’s primitive sailing boat. Fleming vividly describes the journey, the different sounds of the waves as the sea changes from shallow shoreline, to reef, to deep ocean. In the final approach to Crab Key they take down to the sail to avoid radar and paddle till their arms and backs are breaking with the exertion. They pull the canoe up the sandy beach, hide it and their tracks and fall fast asleep.

Honeychile Rider

In the morning Bond is awoken by movement and opens his eyes on a vision: standing on the soft sand, silhouetted by the dazzling blue sea, is the naked figure of a stunningly beautiful woman, reminding him in her pose of Botticelli’s Venus (p.77). Her nakedness is accentuated and made powerfully erotic by just one accoutrement – a leather belt around her waist (just as Tatiana Romanova’s nakedness was accentuated by the black velvet choker she wears in Bond’s bed in From Russia with Love).

She is humming a calypso, ‘Marion/Marianne’ and Bond startles her by completing the verse she had started:

She turns, naked, but instead of covering her crotch conceals her face. Bond eventually realises that, although stunningly beautiful, she’s ashamed of the way her nose has been brutally broken and badly fixed. She says her name is Honeychile Rider and, in another whopping coincidence, that she lives in the very same Morgan Bay where bond and Quarrel are based, in the ruined Grand House along from Bond’s base in Beau Desert. She is of white parentage, in fact her family claim descent from one of the first settlers, given land by Cromwell for signing Charles I’s death warrant (though there is no ‘Rider’ in Wikipedia’s list of regicides). Her house was burned down and her parents killed when she was five. She lived among the ruins with a black nanny who resisted all attempts to send her to school etc till the nanny died when she was 15.

Since when she has had to fend for herself, teaching herself about the world from an old set of encyclopedias, although throughout her childhood she had accumulated an in-depth knowledge of animals and sea creatures. It is this which has brought her to Crab Key, for over the past year she has been learning how to collect rare shells and send them to a merchant in New York who pays her good money. She is saving up the money to fly to New York and get her nose fixed.

Altogether a beguiling mixture of naivete and sophistication, a well-spoken wild child. A fantasy creation, but a fascinating and persuasive one.

The machine-gun boat

Suddenly they hear the sound of a motorboat puttering round the headland. Quarrel appears and says it’s the bad guys. All three of them retreat up the beach and burrow into the sand just beyond the treeline. A motorboat putters into the bay and the black security guys aboard use a loudspeaker to tell Bond and the others to come out with their hands up. Obviously our guys don’t move, or only to burrow deeper into their shallow sandy trenches.

Having warned them several times, the motor boat opens up with a heavy-duty machine gun (a Spandau, Bond thinks). It slices the mango trees above them to ribbons in a storm of metal, the slicing, ringing shots reminding Bond of battlefields in the Ardennes in 1944 (p.77).

Eventually the boat stops firing and the loudhailer tells our heroes that they’ll be back, with the dogs, and it motors out of the bay. Bond, Quarrel and Honeychile emerge from their trenches and see that Honey’s boat has been torn to shreds by the bullets. Now the only way she can leave the island is in Bond’s boat – destiny has thrown them together!

To avoid the security posse, Bond and Quarrel decide to go inland along the small creek which crosses the beach near them. So they pack some food and guns and set off. Cue an atmospheric description of wading up a muddy, swampy, tropical river, bursting pockets of disgusting marsh gas as they go, feeling horrible, slimy things wriggle from under their feet, occasionally stooping to wipe off the leeches.

The posse

Quarrel stops because he can hear the dogs. Then they all hear the sounds of whistles, dogs, the security guards. Honey has the idea of cutting some bamboo shoots and using them as breathing poles from underwater. Bond leads the way through a gap in the mangrove into a hidden pool and they all go underwater, breathing through the hollow poles. They feel/hear the search party barking and splashing past, give it an extra five minutes, then Bond emerges from the water.

But he thinks he can still hear something, a stealthy tread, but before he can warn them the others have made loud spluttering and coughing sounds. The stealthy creeping stops. Bond realises someone was cannily following the main search party. He signs the others to go back underwater. Sure enough, seconds later they feel someone coming into their little pool. When a foot treads on Bond’s shin, he erupts from the water and, just as the bad guy’s rifle butt cracks down onto his forearm, he pushes his revolver right against the chest of a big black guard and pulls the trigger. Bond is thrown backwards but he sees the man, his chest ripped open, disappear back into the water with a horrible gurgling sound.

Honey is appalled and Bond apologises, then leads the gang further upstream. They come to the end of the mangroves, to a more open stretch where they can see the big sugarloaf hill covered in guano, with a set of pre-fabricated Quonset huts at its base. As dusk falls they press on to the inland lake which is the source of the river, pushing through sandy grass to some abandoned huts where they make camp for the night, and eat cold rations.

Along the way they have come across various places which are blasted and scorched, with the bodies of countless birds. Honey explains she’s seen the ‘dragon’ on a number of occasions using its fiery breath to burn and roast the birds and their colonies. Obviously Bond doesn’t believe in any dragon, but he’s intrigued: why has Dr No gone to such trouble to create some kind of ‘dragon’, but more pressing: what has he got against the damn roseate spoonbills?

The abandoned huts are the setting for Honey to add more detail to her backstory, including how her nose got broken: Mander, the overseer of the old estate, was always pestering her and one night arrived drunk and ready to rape her. She fought back and he broke her nose before carrying out the deed. Bond marvels at her beauty and strength and independence, as the confiding of secrets draws them together and they begin to fall in love with each other under the bright stars. If you allow yourself to go with it, it is an exotic and romantic interlude.

The ‘dragon’

In the middle of the night Quarrel wakes them to say he hears the ‘dragon’. Lumbering across the lake comes something with two piercing eyes, the outline of a tail and wings and fire trembling at its mouth. But Bond can also hear the rhythmic pulsing of an engine, probably a diesel. He tells Quarrel to go over one side and fire the rifle at it. Bond will stay this side and try to take out the lights or tyres. But this leads to tragedy. Because Quarrel starts firing first, the dragon turns in his direction and lets out a long stream of fire. Christ, Bond thinks: a flame-thrower! There is one piercing scream from the bushes where Quarrel had been hiding, and then silence. Sickened, Bond (and Fleming and the reader) vividly imagines the warm, friendly man now reduced to a smoking crisp, and the searing unbearsable pain which were his last moments.

The dragon turns towards Bond who fires futilely at the big wheels he can now see, then a loudspeaker tells him to drop his weapon and come out. Honey has run to be by his side and so Bond has to surrender. The back of the ‘dragon’ opens and two black guys with guns get out. They fix handcuffs on Bond and the girl and shepherd them into the back of the vehicle, though not before Bond has walked over to see Quarrel’s body (it is much worse than he’d imagined), cursing himself for dragging Quarrel and the poor girl into this mess (p.104).

The ‘dragon’ wheels and rumbles like a sort of tank on its huge airplane wheels across swamp and marsh, then uphill, then pulls through gates into a compound. Bond and the girl are pushed out at gunpoint, ushered into one of the Quonset huts and along to a doorway.

The luxury trap

When they go through, they are dumbfounded. Suddenly they are in a space which looks like the reception of the swankiest of hotels. Two Chinese women – Sister Lily and Sister Rose – come forward respectfully, tutting over the state of them, removing the handcuffs and apologising for their treatment, saying their rooms await them, with fresh food and clean clothes.

This is a brilliant surreal coup, anticipating the surreal oddity of much 1960s fantasy fiction, like the TV series The Prisoner. Forgetting the brutality of their big black guards and their murder of Quarrel, Bond and Honey fall in with the role of being pampered guests at an upmarket spa. They are shown to their luxury rooms, his and hers, equipped with clean kimonos to wear, deep baths and showers with brand name soaps and bubble baths – Floris Lime bath essence for men, Guerlain bathcubes for women. They wash and clean thoroughly and Honey, now totally at home with Bond, flirts naughtily, inviting him to join her in her bath, before they tuck into a delicious breakfast of bacon and eggs, pineapple juice and coffee. Which is drugged. Honey passes out on her bed; Bond staggers towards his and also passes out.

This surreal chapter ends with a very tall figure, hours later, spectrally entering their respective rooms, pulling back the sheets and examining the naked bodies of his captives, before pulling the sheets slowly back up, using not flesh and blood hands, but eerie, spooky, metal claws! Ooooh flesh-creeping stuff.

Dinner with Dr No

Hours later, Bond and the girl awake to be waited on again by the decorous Chinese ladies. They point out the evening wear which has been laid out for them, and present them with luxury menus from which to choose dinner with Dr No. Will 7.45 for 8 be acceptable?

They wash and dress, Bond amused at Honey’s uncertainty in such ‘civilised’ surroundings, and then they are escorted into the grand dining room of Dr No, an enormous room, beautifully furnished and lined with books, except for the furthest wall which is a shiny black. Slowly Bond and Honey realise this wall is made of glass and directly next to the ocean; they are under sea-level, with the tops of the waves appearing right at the very top of the glass, and so are looking into a real life aquarium of the sea, where they watch, fascinated, as various fish and creatures flit including, memorably, a lazy shark.

Dr No arrives and invites them to sit to dinner. He is well over 6 foot tall, with a curious head shaped like an inverted raindrop, black circles for eyes, and two metal pincers for hands. As in most of the books, the baddie now proceeds to give a full account of his complete autobiography (p.133+), designed to show how his twisted and megalomaniac worldview came about.

(Rarely, for a Bond book, there is little food or opportunity for meals in Dr No, cf for example, Diamonds Are Forever. The dinner with Dr No is almost the only swanky meal Bond enjoys: he orders caviar, grilled lamb cutlets and salad, and angels on horseback, and Honeychile has melon, roast chicken à l’Anglaise, and vanilla ice-cream with hot chocolate sauce, p.123. Yummy. Incidentally, Bond orders a medium Vodka dry Martini, ‘shaken but not stirred’ (p.128), only the second time this formula appears in the books.)

Dr No’s autobiography

Dr No was the son of a German Methodist preacher and a Chinese mother in Peking. His parents abandoned him to be brought up by an aunt. As a youth he was drawn into the ambit of the Chinese criminal gangs, the Triads, in Shanghai, before gang warfare threats caused him to be smuggled into the USA. Here he rose to have responsibility for a lot of Triad money which he has foolish enough to steal. The gang tracked him down and systematically tortured him to reveal where he’d hidden the money. When they failed and he continued to hold out, they cut off both his hands and shot him through the heart. What they didn’t know was that No was the one in a million human beings who have their heart on the right side of their chest, and so he survived.

In hospital recovering, and getting used to the metal hands the state fixed him with, he recast his identity. He called himself doctor because it arouses trust; he gave himself a new surname, No, as a rejection of the father who abandoned him (this reminded me, obscurely, of Malcolm X rejecting his surname/slave name), he had traction to make himself unusually tall.

He emerged from hospital with a new identity, collected the hidden money and set out to find the most isolated spot on earth. He found it in Crab Key, bought it, and used his money to import coolie labour from the mainland and set up a guano-harvesting business. No goes on to explain his need for the utter isolation which gives him complete control over his little kingdom.

No had just arrived at a position of complete control over a self-sustaining colony, when the interfering Audubon Society in America announced that they planned to expand the little colony of two bird-watchers on the island, to build a hotel and make it an international destination for birdwatchers. That explains why No terrorised the two Society bird watchers (making the fatal error of letting one of them survive and make it back to Jamaica) and then arranged for the airplane of Society members to crash and kill them.

Bond takes every opportunity to needle and satirise No to his face. As in other captive situations, Bond’s aim is to unsettle the baddie and also to distract him by fiddling with his cutlery or food and making broad gestures with his hands. This is because, at key moments, Bond palms a sharp steak knife and, after he’s lit the cigarette No offers him, the cigarette lighter.

Missiles

In a surprise development, No then reveals that he didn’t just create a self-enclosed community of peons on an isolated island to gratify his power lust; he has recently taken things a step further. He has been using a powerful radio transmitter to interfere with US Army missile testing which is based on the Turks Islands, a few hundred miles away. No’s people have decoyed several experimental US missiles to crash land at marine locations where they have been able to salvage them and sell them on to the Russians!

This was a big game, a game that explained everything, a game that was certainly, in the international espionage market, well worth the candle. (p.144)

This Cold War/missile plotline feels what my kids call a bit ‘random’, a bit tacked onto the main narrative, to give it a spurious contemporary relevance and urgency. It hadn’t been referred to at all by either M or the local officials in Jamaica in his briefings (surely disappearing US missiles would have been jangling both their bells), and isn’t referenced again at the end of the adventure.

The pain challenge

At the end of the meal, No reveals that his own terrible experiences have given him a horrible, clinical, detached interest in human pain and that he will be using his two guests as lab animals. They were drugged to ensure they had plenty of rest, and now he has fed them good food. They are in their prime and ready for the experiment to begin. The girl will be staked out on a beach over which the island’s thousands of crabs swarm up out of the sea; at first they will crawl over her splayed, naked body with no curiosity, but sooner or later one will nip her and draw blood which the others will taste, and also nip and then they will begin to feed in their thousands, eating her alive (p.147). It will be fascinating to observe.

As this description progresses Honey faints and Bond goes to leap to his feet but an enormous black guy is behind him and grabs his body, holding him in a vice-like grip in his chair.

(The Chair Scene: chairs are dangerous things in James Bond. He was tied to a cane chair with the seat removed in order to be horribly tortured in Casino; and then again secured to a chair while one of Mr Big’s goons deliberately broke his little finger in Live and Let Die; and now this.)

No explains that he has created something special for Bond: a pain challenge, a pain Olympics, a pain odyssey. He will be watching at every point. Enjoy, Mr Bond. Hurling curses and abuse at No, Bond is hustled out of the dining room, up a lift, and along a crude concrete corridor and thrown into a cell.

The Tunnel of Pain

The cell is bare apart from a chair and a grille covered with wire up near the ceiling. It is the only way out; obviously it is the beginning of the test; no point hanging around. There begins an amazing sequence in which Fleming submits his character to a staggering series of tortures and suffering; has any author ever submitted his creation to such pain? Briefly:

When he touches the grille he is electrocuted and regains consciousness on the floor with burned hands. Second time round it’s not electrified and he a) rips it out on the wall b) takes the time to unravel the wire grille and shape the wire strands into a coiled, long, wire harpoon. He folds it double and slips it inside his trousers, and then heaves himself up and through the grille. He turns out to be in a circular tunnel just wider than his shoulders.

• First, as he crawls along it, the metal walls slowly become hotter: he tears of strips of shirt and binds them round his hands and feet, but despite them is badly burned on the now scorching metal, screaming when his bare skin touches it. Eventually the metal cools.
• Next the tunnel take a vertical turn and he has to inch himself painfully upwards, sometimes slipping depressingly back down it.
• Eventually, more dead than alive he flops over the tunnel where it levels out again. As he proceeds, there are portholes at strategic places where the security guards’ faces leer and grin at him.
• As he wearily proceeds, bleeding, his burns blistering then bursting, he becomes aware of a grille in front of him with red eyes behind. Horrifyingly it is a cage full of giant spiders. Distraught, Bond has to cut the grille open (with the knife he secreted at dinner) and then uses the cigarette lighter he also palmed, lighting it to drive the monsters back. But sooner or later they are crushed up against the other end, and Bond has to slash around him with the knife and the push himself on through the disgusting dead bodies, to the next grille and cut his way through.
• Out in the clear tunnel again, he faints.

Fleming records Bond’s suffering in vivid detail. This was the sequence which seared itself on my memory when I first read it as an eleven-year-old. Rereading it, I see how Fleming slowly degrades and dehumanises his hero. By the end Fleming has stopped describing Bond as a human being; he has become an animal running on instinct. A rag. An object.

Critics at the time and down to our day are quick to sniff out places where Fleming patronises or condescends to his women or black characters. But this pales into insignificance compared to the dehumanising degradation he repeatedly subjects his hero to, and nowhere more than in this sequence which subjects Bond to cruel and degrading treatment, sinking him below the level of subhuman.

The stinking, bleeding, black scarecrow moved its arms and legs quite automatically. The thinking, feeling apparatus of Bond was no longer part of his body. It moved alongside his body, or floated above it, keeping enough contact to pull the strings that made the puppet work. Bond was like a cut worm, the two halves of which continue to jerk forward although life has gone and been replaced by the mock life of nervous impulses… (p.166)

Coming round some time later, Bond weakly drags himself forward until he realises the tunnel is sloping downwards, and then more so, and suddenly Bond finds himself slipping and sliding, and then falling directly down the vertical tube.

The giant squid

And then he is out of the tube falling 100 foot vertically into the Caribbean water beneath. He just has time to take a breath and try to arrow his body, so that he dives through the water rather than smacking against it and breaking countless bones. When, after a long time, his body finally returns to the surface and breaks water and he can breathe again, he realises he’s near a fence which stretches across this little bay and extends under the water.

Slowly, wearily, painfully, he pulls himself up the wire fence, noticing the odd, long black strands which seem to be trailing from it down into the water – then realising it is his blood, he is bleeding thick blood from countless burns and wounds. But as he watches he becomes aware of a bubbling under the water and, to his horror, a giant squid appears just below the surface and in a flash a long catcher tentacle leaps up out of the water to touch his foot, then calf, then thigh.

Dazed and dizzy Bond waits till the ‘hand’ of the tendril is up to his chest, then viciously slashes at it with the knife. There’s an explosion of activity in the water and other tentacles shoot up to grab him and pull him down towards the enormous clacking beak at the centre of the monster. Bond feels himself slipping downwards until he is hanging down by one folded leg, then chooses his moment – letting himself drop and using the ‘harpoon’ made of twisted grille wire, which he made what seems like months ago and has accompanied him in his trousers – falls and jabs it directly into one of the enormous eyes peering up at him, pushing deep, deep into the jellied orb.

He comes too, again, hanging painfully from the wire fence in total blackness, his limbs painful to move. Slowly he realises his face and eyes and whole body have been plastered in a huge squirt of poisonous ink from the squid. It is gone, nowhere to be seen. Slowly Bond wipes the muck from his eyes and crawls inch by inch along the top of the wire fence to the nearest headland.

No’s death

Bond collapses on a path next to the fence and catches his breath. Then peers round the corner of the rock and sees: a quayside, Dr No supervising an enormous crane which holds a sort of icing sugar sack through which huge amounts of guano are being directed down into the empty hold of a cargo ship docked alongside.

Nerving himself for a final effort, Bond sprints the hundred yards to the crane and, under cover of the noise, pulls himself up into the cab, ruthlessly stabs his steak knife down deep into the carotid artery of the black cab driver, yanks him out of the seat as the guano stream goes out of control, then pulls the correct levers and turns the steering wheel away from the ship and towards the quay, directing a huge stream of guano with it. At first Dr No shouts with irritation, then Bond can see the sudden realisation on his face, as he turns to run, but it is too late. Bond stops the crane’s extended arm directly over the gangling sadist and in a split second his body is buried in tons and tones of stinking bird crap.

Escape in a ‘dragon’

Mission accomplished, Bond leaps out of the cab, runs along the quayside and up to the hole in the cliff where the conveyor belt bringing the guano comes out. There’s a walkway alongside it and Bond sprints up it till he collides with a figure dressed in overalls and, after some desultory rough and tumble, realises it’s Honey. Honeychile alive! Quickly she tells her story: being a lifelong friend of animals and a water baby it turns out that she was not afraid of the crabs which crawled over her, and spent her time loosening one of the stakes they’d used to spread her on the sand. As soon as one was free, it took a few minutes to loosen the others, clamber up the beach, find some spare overalls in a locker, and here she is! Not particularly plausible…

They hide as some security guards go running past, then head down a corridor and arrive – very fortunately – in the chamber where the ‘dragon’ is kept. Bond locks the chamber door, they climb into the ‘dragon’, fire up the engine and smash through the doors of the ‘dragon’ shed. Crunch and munch over buildings, over the perimeter fence along tracks and over marshes. After a while they hear the tracker dogs pursuing them, so Bond parks on the edge of a bog and, as the dogs arrive, shoots a few through the gun slit, and the rest of the pack turn on the wounded ones in a frenzy. Yuk. In this book the bloodshed seems to go on forever. But now Bond’s battered, bleeding, broken body is at the end of its tether.

Epilogue in Jamaica

Cut to Bond in the High Commissioner’s office back in Kingston, talking to him, the Assistant Commissioner, Brigadier of Police and local Navy representative. They agree to send a visiting Royal Navy ship to Crab Key to mop up Dr No’s associates.

Fleming backfills the events leading up to this scene. How Honey helped Bond out of the dragon and into Quarrel’s boat; how she sailed capably back to Jamaica; how she helped him out of the boat and into the Beau Desert house, washed and tended his wounds and then laved him in antiseptic, while he screamed and wept at the pain; before driving him to Kingston Hospital where proper doctors tended to his wounds. And then onto the Queen’s House and presenting his story to the gathered officials. (Doing it this way, as a flashback, allows Fleming to skip over the events quickly and, especially, to avoid Bond’s report to the British officials ie skip a great deal of repetition).

Glad to be out of the house of bureaucrats he guns his car at all speed back to Morgans Bay. Here Honey is waiting for him in the ruins of the old mansion which have been her home. To Bond’s surprise her secret lair is surprisingly clean and she has laid a neat table and prepared cold lobster and home-made mayonnaise under a chandelier lit with candles.

Honey had asked him to join her in her sleeping bag when they camped by the lake on Crab Key, but Bond had refused, needing to keep his mind clear. She had invited him to join her in the bath in Dr No’s weirdly luxurious hotel-prison and, again, he had refused. Both times Honeychile pointed out that he owed her, owed her ‘slave time’. Now, for the third time, she indicates the homely bed she’s slept on for years, carefully laid with a clean new double sleeping bag, unzipped, open and waiting. Now Bond must fulfil his ‘slave time’ debt to her. He begins to object and the novel ends with a smile, on Honeychile’s commanding voice saying with mock sternness: ‘Do as you’re told!’

Critics accuse Fleming of being sex-mad or stuffing the books with sex. This long and very physical narrative has a number of moments of flirtation and sexiness – but not one actual act of coitus. ‘Literary’ and ‘comic’ authors like David Lodge or Howard Jacobson have much, much, much more sex in them and no-one seems to complain, in fact they win loads of prizes.

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Enjoyment of life

There are some scattered references to sex, there are fast cars and gambling, there is the swift, effective handling of the melodramatic plot – but what strikes me and appeals most to me about the Bond books is the tremendous sense Fleming gives of his hero being a fit, healthy man who is sensuously aware of his own body, of its powers and passions, and who loves and enjoys his life.

Bond exercises, he works out, he has bracing cold showers, he stands naked in hotel rooms and saunas, rejoicing in the life that is in him. He flies around the world, stays in luxury hotels, eats choice meals and knows his beverages. He sails, scuba dives, swims and knows how to drive a fast car. And of course he has a well-publicised taste for light sado-masochistic sex (although all this really seems to amount to is some spanking, maybe grabbing the woman’s hair curing coitus: nothing compared to Fifty Shades of Grey). And his author subjects him to staggering amounts of damage and torture – maybe more in this book than any other – but all of which has the effect of emphasising the value of life and health, and make this reader grateful for the sheer glory and power of existence.

Compared to the suicidal adulterers of, say, Graham Greene’s fiction, or the pessimistic vision of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), or the nihilism of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1957), or Samuel Becket’s despairing dramas (Waiting for Godot was first performed in the year Casino Royale was published, 1953) – compared to the dour, depressive negativity of so much ‘serious literature’, Fleming’s fiction chooses life, affirms life, celebrates life, which is most keenly felt at the edge of danger and death.

I think Fleming’s fictions’ whole-hearted embrace of the good things of life – physical health, mental alertness, the beauty of the world, stunning landscapes and ravishing women, fast cars and exciting sports – outlive and outweigh the silly plots and remain to this day powerfully written affirmations of the wonder of being alive. I think this is the secret of his enduring success.

The Blue Hills was a comfortable old-fashioned hotel with modern trimmings. Bond was welcomed with deference because his reservations had been made by King’s House. He was shown to a fine corner room with a balcony looking out over a distant sweep of Kingston harbour. Thankfully he took off his London clothes, now moist with perspiration, and went into the glass-fronted shower and turned the cold water full on and stood under it for five minutes during which he washed his hair to remove the last dirt of big-city life. Then he pulled on a pair of Sea Island cotton shorts and, with sensual pleasure at the warm soft air on his nakedness, unpacked his things and rang for a waiter.

Bond ordered a double lime and tonic and one whole green lime. When the drink came he cut the lime in half, dropped the two squeezed halves into the long glass, almost filled the glass with ice cubes and then poured in the tonic. He took the drink out onto the balcony, and sat and looked out across the spectacular view. He thought how wonderful it was to be away from headquarters, and from London, and from hospitals, and to be here, at this moment, doing what he was doing and knowing, as all his senses told him, that he was on a good tough case again. (pp.33-34)

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Bond details

In the second chapter Bond is told he must give up his beloved .25 Beretta 418 handgun. It was the silencer momentarily snagging in his pocket which helped Klebb overcome him in Russia. Instead, M orders him to take the advice of the Secret Service Armourer, Geoffrey Boothroyd, and replace it with a Walther PPK 7.65mm.

The sound of bullets from the heavy Spandau machine gun remind Bond of his wartime experiences in the Ardennes (p.77), presumably in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 to January 1945.

More calypso

In chapter four, Quarrel takes Bond to the seafront bar, the Joy Boat, where there’s a live band which, among others, plays this song.

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Credit

Dr No by Ian Fleming was published in 1958 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 1960 Pan paperback, 1972 edition (price: 30p).

Related links

• Dr No (novel) on Amazon
• Dr No (movie) on Amazon
• Ian Fleming website
• Dr No Wikipedia article
• Beretta 418
• Walther PPK 7.65mm
• Narrative structures in Fleming by Umberto Eco

Other thrillers from 1958

• Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene
• The Land God Gave To Cain by Hammond Innes
• South by Java Head by Alistair MacLean

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.